A number of science fiction writers (David Brin being probably the best known of them) have written about the idea of ‘uplift‘ – sub-sentient animals raised to human (or even higher) levels of cognition by scientific means; the transhumanist movement is quite fond of it as a conceptual meme too. Which means science fiction and transhumanism can have a day of feeling vindicated; via Peter Watts, a science fiction author whose science qualifications are more than impeccable, comes the news that a team of Chinese scientists have not only discovered the gene that triggers production of a chemical intrinsic to human cognition, but managed to splice it into chimpanzees and observe the protein in question being produced. Or, in layman’s terms, we may have found a way to create chimps with human intelligence, which may throw an interesting light on Hiasl’s human rights case.

If you’re a writer, you probably spend a lot of time trying to work out what sort of work is going to impress a publisher. For those of you who write genre fiction, Andrew Wheeler of the SFBC (with his tongue somewhat in his cheek) offers one answer to that question:

“If there’s a book out there that can be honestly sold by a cover of a mostly-naked woman riding a dragon while a spaceship explodes in the background, I’d love to see it. (I bet I could sell a whole lot of them.)”

Harvard University and a group of other institutions have announced the launch of an ambitious project that realises the dream of biologist E. O. Wilson. The Encyclopedia of Life is to be a freely accessible Wikipedia-style web resource aiming to catalogue evry single living species on the face of the planet. Planned to be built over the next decade, and moderated by experts in the relevant topics, Wilson hopes it will become “the key tool that we need to inspire preservation of Earth’s biodiversity.” I can’t argue with that. I can, however, wonder how dated the wiki format will look in a decade – I hope they’re building it on a non-proprietory database.

The advertising industry is getting pretty desperate to keep our attention; there’s a lot of evidence that we’re becoming increasingly resistant to ads (after all, when did you last click on an Adsense square?), and more cities may follow the lead of Sao Paulo and ban billboards entirely. Until then, it’s the same old frantic war for your eyeball attention, and the lastest weapon is the Eyebox2 – a device that can track the attention of a number of people from up to ten meters away, hence providing feedback on the effectiveness of individual ads, or perhaps changing their content when attention starts to wane. There’s never been a better time to start up a street stall selling cheap sunglasses. [SmartMobs]